Re: Geometry and spatial indexes, my opinion

On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 7:32 PM, Simonson, Lucanus J
<lucanus.j.simonson <at> intel.com> wrote:
> Michael Fawcett wrote:
>>As for the heterogeneous types, think of huge (GBs worth) digital
>>elevation models in meter units where altitude is in a range from 0 -
>>20,000m.  In that case, my point type would be something like
>>vector3<int, short, int> instead of a vector3<int>.
>
> Phil Endecott wrote:
>>In GPS data, I store altitude to the nearest metre in an int16_t, and
>>altitude and longitude in degrees in 32-bit fixed-point types.
>>Although longitude needs one more bit than latitude I tend to use the
>>same type for both, so my 2d algorithms are homogeneous.  But anything
>>that also involves altitude needs to be heterogeneous.
>
> In VLSI layout we sometimes represent the layer as the z axis of a 3D
> coordinate system.  Because there are only tens of layers we can use
> something smaller than int to store it.  However, the compiler will
> often pad it back to word aligned addressing and insert padding bytes
> into a data structure, reducing the memory savings.  Also, internally,
> all arithmetic is 32 bit or greater, so there is no advantage in using
> smaller data types for local operations.  I think it is perfectly
> reasonable to allow point classes to have heterogeneous coordinate
> types, but require them to cast to and from a homogeneous coordinate
> type at the interface between that object and the geometry library.  In
> all three examples, we would make the coordinate type of the interface
> between the point and the library int and allow the 16 bit value to cast
> up to 32 bits when it is read into an algorithm and back down to 16 bits
> when it is written out.

I don't understand why the interface or algorithm cares whether it's
homogeneous or heterogeneous.

--Michael Fawcett
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